This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Congress sucks

  • Sanchez’ racism

    Loretta Sanchez’ Hispanic extraction is a matter of convenience. When she lost her first run at a public office as a Republican and using her married name, Brixley, she lost. Two years later, she ran using her maiden name and as a Republican and won. Last week, on the Spanish language television network, she told voters in her district;

    The Vietnamese and the Republicans are — with intensity — trying to take away this seat, this seat for which we have already done so much for our community. [Taking] this seat from us and [giving] it to this Van Tran, who’s very anti-immigrant and very anti-Hispanic.

    She might as well have said the Viet Cong were attacking us.

    Everything boils down to race. This country has always been a melting pot and Loretta Sanchez, by making her election race about “us vs. them” is polarizing her district. I guess she hoped that if she said that on Spanish-language TV, no one would find out about her racism.

    Suppose John McCain had told the American public that the Blacks were trying to take over the White House in 2008. What kind of reaction would that have caused?

    Van Tran, her opponent said in the Los Angeles Times;

    “This is a mischaracterization that there is an alleged wedge between the Vietnamese and Latino community,” he said.

    Sanchez is a racist and doesn’t deserve her position in Congress.

  • How much do you trust Democrats?

    Well, they hope you trust them a whole lot because they’ve decided that they’re not going to renew the Bush tax cuts for even the middle class until after the elections. Those tax cuts expire at the end of the following month and affect every tax payer. (Fox Business News link)

    “Democrats believe we must permanently extend tax cuts for the middle-class before they expire at the end of the year, and we will,” Jim Manley, a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Reid said in an email. “Unfortunately, to this point we have received no cooperation from Republicans to do so.”

    The Senate will come back after its recess for the November elections to address the issue, he said. The Senate had been expected to take the lead on the issue, though House leaders were still discussing whether to take their own vote, according to aides.

    Of course, it’s always the Republicans’ fault. More than 300 economists signed a letter to Obama claiming that tax hikes on even the highest earning Americans will have a severe impact on the economy. I’d argue that it already has since no one is spending money this year in case they need it next year to pay their taxes. If no one spends money, how does the economy recover?

    Senator Charles Grassley, the senior Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, said putting off a vote was irresponsible and reckless.

    “Leaving people with uncertainty is a dereliction of duty. One party has control of the White House and both houses of Congress and still can’t get the people’s business done,” he said in a statement.

    It’s more than irresponsible to hold the American people hostage for more than a month trapped in a poorly performing economy. Sure they’ve promised to keep the tax cuts in place, but how many promises have politicians broken over the last couple of hundred years. Never happened, right?

  • That vote to lift gay ban

    Harry Reid’s gambit to foist gays on the military failed miserably today. This is how Associated Press tells the tale;

    Yeah, Republicans did it all by themselves. Democrats have a majority in the Senate, but it was Republicans who sunk the bill. Well, unless you scroll waaayyy down the page to the 18th paragraph;

    Democrats also failed to keep all of their party members in line. Democratic Sens. Blanche Lincoln and Mark Pryor, both of Arkansas, voted with Republicans to scuttle the bill. The vote was 56-43, four short of the 60 required to advance under Senate rules.

    All that matters is the headline anyway, right? That’s as far as those dillweeds at Democratic Underground read, anyway. You can read about the politics of Reid’s motivations at Blackfive.

    I want to get something straight;

    Someone wrote earlier today in the comments that this blog supports the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. That’s false, you must be thinking of another blog.

    This blog stands firmly on the fact that we’re in a war and everything else is bullshit. Discussing who can put what in who is for another time when there aren’t any enemies at the door. These votes on abortion, gays in the military and whatever else bullshit is larded up in the defense bill are distractions from business of killing jihadis.

    If the Democrats had been committed to the military as they are to every bullshit namby-pamby, deviant group that might vote for them, this war would have been over years ago.

    I might have been persuaded to think about gays in the military, but the antics of active duty and reservists of that persuasion have steered me away from anything that might have ever been considered support. LT Choi is no different than Bobby Whittenberg.

  • Military issues; everything except war

    Last year, we waited more than a hundred days while the President made up his mind whether or not he wanted to win in Afghanistan and provide General McCrystal with the troops he said he needed to win in Afghanistan, Finally, the President decided to give the General half of what he requested as a compromise with his political base – as if victory against terrorism could be possible with a compromise.

    General McChrystal is gone now because he happen to complain to a reporter about the support he wasn’t getting. Now, a year later, we’re debating whether we can win in Afghanistan after General McChrystal had already predicted we wouldn’t without giving the support he needed.

    Earlier last year the President tried to jam down the throats of service-connected disabled veterans a plan to force those veterans to buy insurance to cover their treatment so the President could afford to provide free healthcare for families making more than $80,000/year who hadn’t served in the military. If not for the Veteran Service Organizations, we’d be paying our premiums right now.

    Now, we look at the “Defense” Bill which seems to have everything in it except defense.

    What should have been a routine budget bill for the Pentagon is now a political cauldron brimming with proposed policy changes over abortion, gay rights and illegal immigration. Senate Democrats have folded, or attempted to fold, all those issues into a single defense package, leading to accusations that the Senate is needlessly politicizing its annual obligation to fund the military.

    As the parties hurl political hand grenades at one another, stuck in the crossfire is the military itself.

    Even pop culture figure, Lady Gaga, who until recently I thought was a transvestite, has entered the debate by pleading with college students in Maine to harass their Congress members to repeal the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy which allows gays to serve in the military. Really? Maine? If she was interested in having an impact on the discussion, she should have gone to Alabama or Mississippi. No courage in going to Maine.

    So i guess these issues that aren’t really related to the defense budget are being added so Democrats can bitch that Republicans don’t support the troops during the election when they vote against the larded bill. But it hardly compares to the votes in Congress over the last ten years in which Democrats really did vote against defense bills in an effort to actually defund the military. Like the four times between 2006 and 2008 the Democrats actually voted specifically to cut off funding for deployed troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

    So this is what Democrats think of the troops – they are a political football to kick back and forth to achieve their political agenda. Their pitched battles can be compromised. The victories on the battlefield take a backseat to victories at the polls.

    See, I learned this decades ago when I was sitting in the Saudi desert waiting for Congress to decide whether I can fight or not…while they used me and my troops to blackmail President GHW Bush into signing a tax hike bill that would defeat him several months later. And, oh, I also figured out that Congress hoped we would lose and die by the thousands so they could use that as ammunition in the election, too.

  • What is Nancy doing?

    COB6 sent this photo that just begs for a caption contest.

  • Tax cuts for the rich, huh?

    For the last two years, I’ve been warning about the impending tax hike that was occurring simply because the Bush Tax Cuts were expiring the first of next year. Every time I mentioned it, one of our resident liberals would call the Bush Tax Cuts a “tax cut for the rich”. The Associated Press seems to have finally come down on my side;

    A typical family of four with a household income of $50,000 a year would have to pay $2,900 more in taxes in 2011, according to a new analysis by Deloitte Tax LLP, a tax consulting firm. The same family making $100,000 a year would see its taxes rise by $4,500.

    What they don’t mention, however, is that many families who’ve paid no taxes would pay taxes for the first time since 2001. Families who were in the lowest tax bracket, would have their taxes increased by 50%.

    Nancy Pelosi on extending the tax cut;

    House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., wouldn’t commit to vote on any tax proposals before the election. She did, however, pledge to address them by the end of the year.

    “The only thing I can tell you is that the tax cuts for the middle class will be extended this Congress,” Pelosi told reporters Thursday.

    Yeah, I trust that she’ll extend the tax cut if she’s a lame duck in December. Don’t you? She’d let the cuts expire just to punish Americans for voting against her party.

  • Reid lards up defense bill with immigration reform

    Reid tries to sneak immigration reform measures through the Senate by adding them to the upcoming defense bill, according to CNN;

    Reid called the DREAM Act “really important” and said it should be passed because it provides a path to citizenship for young illegal immigrants who go to college or serve in the military. DREAM is an acronym for Development, Relief and Education of Alien Minors Act.

    “I know we can’t do comprehensive immigration reform,” Reid said at a news conference. “But those Republicans we had in the last Congress have left us.”

    Many Hispanic voters are angry with Democratic leaders for not doing more to pass an immigration overhaul. The decision by Reid to add the DREAM Act now could help soothe that anger.

    And, of course, when Republicans vote against the immigration reform, VoteVets will write a piece on Vets Voice about how Republicans voted against funding the troops. Reid is only doing this to earn himself some votes in Nevada.

    Thanks to Old Trooper for the link.

  • WV Senate race tightens

    The Senate seat vacated by Robert Byrd’s long-overdue death earlier this year in West Virginia was supposed to be an easy win for Democrat Governor Joe Manchin III a few months ago, but, according to the Washington Times, the race between Manchin and Morgantown business executive John Raese has closed to a point lead for Manchin;

    While the governor and both U.S. senators are Democrats, West Virginia has leaned Republican in recent national elections, supporting George W. Bush twice and backing Sen. John McCain over Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election. About 70 percent of state residents disapprove of the job Mr. Obama is doing, according to the most recent Rasmussen survey.

    This is Raese’s third run at the Senate seat. The Democrat thinks he can distract West Virginian voters by declaring that they are unique among Democrats;

    Mr. Manchin told the Associated Press that West Virginia Democrats are different, not attached to national labels.

    “Washington could use a good dose of West Virginia,” the governor said.

    Yeah, but does that dose of West Virginia mean a vote against Harry Reid for the Senate majority leader? I doubt it. And that means the economy-killing agenda goes forward next year with Pelosi, Reid and Obama in the van.

    Here’s the Raese ad I’ve seen most often here;